Just completed, the marriage between Microsoft and Mistral AI, a young French company, is already causing a stir. The European Union believes that Paris has not played fair.
Is Microsoft becoming a little too dominant in the critical sector of artificial intelligence? Has France sabotaged European directives to protect its startups? Are French elected officials too sensitive to American tech lobbies? All these questions and others are at the heart of new discussions in Brussels following Microsoft’s investment in the young company Mistral AI.
The EU is watching Microsoft very closely
Let’s summarize the matter: on February 26, Microsoft announced investing 15 million euros in Mistral, the French company which wishes to shake up the domination of ChatGPT with its new chatbot nicknamed “Le Chat”. The agreement is signed with great fanfare, Microsoft welcomes this opportunity to “unlock new business opportunities» and Mistral announces that its language model will be available on the giant’s Azure cloud.
On the side of the French executive, we also congratulate ourselves. Marina Ferrari, the newly elected Secretary of State for Digital Affairs, explains to La Tribune that it is necessary “rejoice in this agreement» and that is a good thing «that a young French company achieves a partnership of this magnitude with Microsoft“. Except that above, this news makes people cringe. A few hours after the announcement of the partnership, European anti-competitive authorities began to request a formal investigation to determine whether Microsoft’s domination in the generative AI sector did not violate the rules of the 27.
Microsoft is already being watched very closely on the subject due to its massive investment in OpenAI. In this context, the additional investment in Mistral could give too much power to a single actor, explains Reuters.
Suspicious timing
But it’s not just a story of big money. European authorities were also concerned about the timing of this announcement, just a few weeks after the risky adoption of the AI Act. The French government and Mistral, at the time, pushed with all their strength to ensure that the text was as tender as possible with European companies, even if it meant almost derailing it at the finish line.
“This story appears to have been a cover for a lobbying operation by major US technology companies», denounced Kim Van Sparrentak, MEP. “The regulators were fooled», Estimates the elected official. The Open Markets Institute, an NGO specializing in competition law in Europe, believes that “this announcement clearly shows that the arguments to defeat the IA Act on the altar of “European champions” were only a charade“.
The Secretary of State for Digital, for her part, denies any conflict of interest. To La Tribune, she specifies that the state had “notno knowledge of Mistral’s commercial negotiations» and that the French position simply aimed to “defend the general interest, in relation to the state of development of AI in our country“. To see if Brussels allows itself to be convinced.
Source : Reuters, The gallery
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